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''Passion'' is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by James Lapine. The story was adapted from Ettore Scola's film ''Passione d'Amore''. Central themes include love, sex, obsession, illness, passion, beauty, power and manipulation. ''Passion'' is notable for being one of the few projects that Stephen Sondheim himself conceived, along with ''Sweeney Todd'' and ''Road Show''. Set in 19th century Italy, the plot concerns a young soldier and the changes in him brought about by the obsessive love of Fosca, his Colonel's homely, ailing cousin. ==Background and history== The story originally came from a 19th-century novel by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti, an experimental Italian writer who was prominently associated with the Scapigliatura movement. His book ''Fosca'' was a fictionalized recounting of an affair he'd once had with an epileptic woman when he was a soldier.〔Secrest, Meryl. ''Stephen Sondheim: A Life''. Delta; new edition (1999), 337〕 Sondheim first came up with the idea of writing a musical when he saw the Italian film in 1983: As Fosca started to speak and the camera cut back to her, I had my epiphany. I realized that the story was not about how she is going to fall in love with him, but about how he is going to fall in love with her . . . at the same time thinking, "They're never going to convince me of that, they're never going to pull that off," all the while knowing they would, that Scola wouldn't have taken on such a ripely melodramatic story unless he was convinced that he could make it plausible. By the end of the movie, the unwritten songs in my head were brimming and I was certain of two things. First, I wanted to make it into a musical, the problem being that it couldn't be a musical, not even in my nontraditional style, because the characters were so outsized. Second, I wanted James Lapine to write it; he was a romantic, he had a feel for different centuries and different cultures, and he was enthusiastically attracted to weirdness.〔Sondheim, Stephen. ''Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011)''. Knopf (2011), 177〕 As it turned out, Lapine was already exploring the idea of adapting ''Muscle'', a memoir by Sam Fussell, for the musical stage. Together, they came up with the idea of a pair of double-billing one acts. Lapine wrote a couple of scenes and Sondheim had just started working on the opening number when he began to feel that his musical style was unsuitable for ''Muscle''. The piece was more contemporary and, in his opinion, required a score reflecting pop sensibilities. He called up Lapine and suggested that he find another songwriter, perhaps William Finn, and include it as a companion piece. Meanwhile, they continued to work on ''Passion'' and as the piece grew, they found that it was enough to fill out an entire evening of theatre. ''Muscle'' was eventually shelved.〔Secrest, Meryl. ''Stephen Sondheim: A Life''. Delta; new edition (1999), 379〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Passion (musical)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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